proxychains – handy tool!

proxychains is a pretty amazing tool available at http://proxychains.sourceforge.net/. It is a versitile proxy tool. So folks like me, who would like the source IPs to be from a proxy, or multiple proxys. For me, the main uses are proxying gui port scan stuff like nessus and proxying tor.

Proxying port scans can be handy if you want the address to come from something else. For example, you might have an ssh server somewhere that you’d like to scan from. Or you might want to port scan through tor. To porscan through an ssh server

ssh -D 2323 mysshserver

#edit /etc/proxychains.conf so socks4 is set to 2323

#socks4 127.0.0.1 2323

proxychains nmap -T4…

then all nmap traffic will appear to come from your ssh server. Very cool! In addition, you can set up a tor proxy, haver proxychains point to it from proxychains.conf, and launch your program similarly using proxychains. This has the advantage of having everything go through tor. So if you wanted you could port scan through tor.

A usually more legitimate use would be to launch firefox using proxychains through tor. This is superior to simply setting the proxy through ff itself because when ff sets a local proxy there is still dns leakage, potential flash leakage etc. If it is launched through the proxy, all children of the process go through tor.